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Monday, 12 December 2016

Something Big…

Alphen, Netherlands. 12
December. Something big will happen. Very big. It will probably be big and
nasty, and it is probably coming to a town near you. If you do not believe me
then look at the dark side of globalisation that since the year 2000 has driven
the West into retreat and rapidly shifted the world balance of power.

The
failures of campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; the successful Russian
seizure of Crimea and much of Ukraine; the murder of 298 people aboard MH17;
the collapse of Syria and the expansion of Russian influence across the Levant
at the expense of the West; the creation of a Russian, Iranian, Syrian axis;
the egregious use of disinformation and cyber warfare against NATO and EU
members with little by way of response; the development of an
expeditionary-capable Russian military; the emerging Chinese-Russian strategic
accommodation; the strategically-vital loss of Turkey to the West; the cutting
of 40% of Europe’s military capacity and some 30% of Europe’s military
capability; the banking and Eurozone crises and the collapse of European
economic growth since 2008; the various ‘peasants’’ revolts via Brexit, the
election of Donald L. Trump, the loss of the Italian referendum, and the rise
of the populist left and right; aggressive Chinese expansionism in the South
China Sea allied to a massive enhancement in Chinese military capability
following 27 years of annual double-digit increases in defence expenditure; sequestration
in the US and the loss of US military supremacy; the rise of global-reach
Islamism, most notably the development of Al Qaeda and Islamic State networks
that now reach deep into Western societies; proxy wars across the Middle East
and North Africa as geopolitical and regional powers compete in the vacuum caused
by the retreat of the West; the weakening of Western-led institutional security
as major states begin to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and Machtpolitik again becomes the main
currency of power and change in international relations; the growing
ungovernability of European states as multiple identities undermine social
cohesion, a fracturing of Western society reinforced by the ‘post-truth’ anarchy
of social media; hyper-immigration allied to the loss of faith of indigenous
economically-enfeebled populations in the judgement of ruling elites; growing
food and water stress…and so on and so on.

The result? In Europe there
is certainly a fin de siècle feeling these
days as if a not-so-golden, but by no means bad age is fast coming to an end to
be replaced by a new, but ill-defined ‘something’
that will be far more sinister. Perhaps thinkers back in 1910 or 1935 had the
same sense of foreboding and frustration that I do as I survey the ‘something
big’ consequences of the interaction between power and weakness, change and
events.

Why do I feel this way? You
see analysis for me is not simply about wading through a catalogue of events
and trying to impart some sense to each in turn. It is about insight driven by the
interactions between events set against a backdrop of history and data, which
is in turn illuminated by the grand strategies of power and weakness. The
really strange thing about Europe today is that it is wilfully weak, as though
it has lost the will to compete in a hyper-competitive world. It is a strange
almost ideological weakism born of an intellectual political,
over-institutionalised elite too many of whom seem detached from power, people
and perspective, lost in another world of theoretical, see the world as they would
like it, rather than what it is, politics. The politics of ‘isms’.

And yet this year alone should
have awoken Europe’s elite from their strategic slumber. Shock has followed
shock as the great plates of economic, social, and military structure have
begun to crack under the growing tectonic political tension between the hoped
for and the what is. Europe today is not about the management of decline, it is
about the management of paralysis.

Set that paralysis
against the megatrends driving change in the World and the events and processes
impacting upon Europe begin to form a toxic mosaic. The ‘something big’ that these
megatrends is spawning will change the relationship forever between the once
powerful, the newly powerful, and the wilfully weak, between values and
interests, and between the ‘man’, the state and, quite possibly, war.

Too many of Europe’s
elite still seem unable to see such change. They remain in thrall to a
beautiful, Utopian, Panglossian idea of globalisation in which open borders, multiculturalism,
and interdependence will somehow lead to a promised land in which all the old
vices of humanity would simply melt away. Now unleashed the mega-forces of globalisation
cannot be stopped and they are by no means all benign. Rapid population growth
and shift, the digital destruction of law, order and borders, rapid shifts in
wealth patterns, global-reach terrorism and criminality, the spread of weapons
of mass destruction many of them reflective of new technologies are all
symptoms of dark globalisation in which aspiration and desperation merge, and
which erodes the very structure and order the West gave to the world.

Yes, it is true that the hollow
people who ‘lead’ Pangloss, or rather who calculate electoral success, are indeed
to blame for much that is wrong. However, the forces now at play are far, far
bigger than the little people we Europeans have by large charged with
‘leadership’. For that reason alone we the citizens must also bear some
responsibility for allowing ourselves to be treated like children. Unable to
conceive of, let alone cope with the forces now at play leaders have instead
chosen to mask change from us in the hope that when the inevitable is rendered unavoidable
it will not be on their watch. They treat we the people like children because
we the people prefer to be treated like children, to go on pretending that
change is in fact no change, even as we drown daily in evidence of change all
around us.

The result is that Europe
today has become Eurovision Europe, Strictly Come Dancing Europe, a ‘nul points’,
song contest Europe in which the mediocre is acclaimed and false friendships
proclaimed. As realism has been rejected for weakism the once great temples of
our ambition and hope have become empty shells forced by the siphoning away of
their power to endeavour to maintain the appearance of power, but in fact
hollowed-out to the point of collapse. The United Nations is not. The European
Union is yesterday’s child simply unable to cope with a new age of grand
disorder and popular anarchy. Our tired leaders trot out tired mantras about
NATO the cornerstone of our security and defence, even as they turn the
Alliance into a gigantic and transparent bluff by denying the very tools needed
to fashion that defence. And, with each passing day we grown weaker and more
vulnerable to ‘something big’.

It is the forces of
reaction that seem to best appreciate the scale of the ‘something big’ that is
coming our way for it is ‘progressives’ are now the out-of-touch reactionaries.
As the gap between the ‘progressive’ and the reactionary grows the elite
retreat ever higher up their Utopian tower into irrelevance, spouting ever grander,
ever more vacuous sentiments, whilst reaction occupies the lost ground of hope promising
an embittered people they can go on being children for just that little bit
longer. Only if globalisation can be made to work for the teeming masses will ‘progressives’
again progress. Instead, by retreating ever deeper into the la-la Neverland of
politics the ‘progressives’ have ceded the field to the reactionaries who by
their very nature tend to understand the dark globalisation of which they are
part.

This elite retreat is
often masked by the sneering language of dismissal, to call anyone who
challenges fading elite authority as ‘populists’. And yet only populism can re-connect power
and people. If the elite are to regain lost authority they too must embrace
some form of populism. Why? Because the case must again be made for elites. In
Europe that means embracing those that simply point out the inconvenient but blindingly
bloody obvious that the elitist European grand
dessin has failed utterly to help Europe meet the challenges of the age. If
that is populism then I am guilty as charged. Indeed, what I want, what I have
always wanted, is for elites to get better so that they may better cope with
the ‘something big’ that is coming; to prepare, to plan, and ultimately to
prevail.

The real enemies of the people
are not the elites, we need them, but rather the grand reactionaries this age
is spawning. Marine le Pen in France, Vladimir
Putin in Russia, maybe Donald Trump in America, all tap into a popular and
correct sense that the weakism of traditional elites is responsible for much of
the failure they see around them. Their analysis is sound, even if in reality
they offer nothing but political dust. The most important difference between
weakist liberal elites and the grand reactionary populists is that at least the
latter have the political courage to recognise ‘something big’ is coming, even
if they will certainly make ‘it’ far more nasty than ‘it’ need be, when ‘it’
eventually arrives.

Ultimately, it is the creed
of weakism that is to blame for the retreat of the West in which I believe and
of a Europe that is and must be central to that West. It is retreat caused by elites
who wilfully choose to look at a receding sunny sky and refuse to turn round
and see the dark storm that is fast approaching behind them. Who endlessly file
away big dangers in the not-for-today, too difficult, somebody else’s problem for
another day dossier. Who spend far much time obsessing over their own status
rather than trying to make the million small changes for the better that really
decide between power and weakness.

Is it too late? No, but
only if our leaders wake up and break-out of their determinedly, wilfully, short-termist,
little thinking dressed up as weighty grandiloquence mindset. This week in
Brussels another EU European Council will take place. Yawn. Will they discuss
something big. Yes, of course they will. Will the do anything about it? No, not
really.

Something big is coming
to a town near you. I do not know what it is, but it is big and it is coming because
we Europeans have chosen to be victims of this world not shapers of it. But
then again I am not at all sure who the hell ‘we’ are anymore, and that is an entirely
different but parallel story.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.